The Quadrangle Well

They made a decorative well in the campus where books and laptops were set aside by the skinny staked newly planted ancient oaks. Students could sit there to be good company if they could find it. The well is small, a bricked hole, a shallow ocular sink holding a green stillness, yet direct sun made it live. In the dazzle of the day undergrads agree not to notice a diminutive tide going in and out, the hump-backed splashes of surfacing Plesiosauri magnified from lava and spawn, until a passing cloud clarifies these malformed gestations. Girls in shorts check their bare legs for teeth marks as the noon day bell rings. The wells inner-life subsides as light dwindles, damsel fly and water striders skim the small round waters, while some feed upon the drowned bones of prehistoric ghosts. A memo is eventually sent to the groundskeeper demanding he stop feeding the reptiles.